The Good, the Bad, and the Red: Implicit Color-Valence Associations Across Cultures
- Author(s)
- Claudia Kawai, Yang Zhang, Gáspár Lukács, Wenyi Chu, Chaoyi Zheng, Cijun Gao, Davood Gozli, Yonghui Wang, Ulrich Ansorge
- Abstract
Cultural differences—as well as similarities—have been found in explicit color-emotion associations between Chinese and Western populations. However, implicit associations in a cross-cultural context remain an understudied topic, despite their sensitivity to more implicit knowledge. Moreover, they can be used to study color systems—that is, emotional associations with one color in the context of an opposed one. Therefore, we tested the influence of two different color oppositions on affective stimulus categorization: red versus green and red versus white, in two experiments. In Experiment 1, stimuli comprised positive and negative words, and participants from the West (Austria/Germany), and the East (Mainland China, Macau) were tested in their native languages. The Western group showed a significantly stronger color-valence interaction effect than the Mainland Chinese (but not the Macanese) group for red-green but not for red-white opposition. To explore color-valence interaction effects independently of word stimulus differences between participant groups, we used affective silhouettes instead of words in Experiment 2. Again, the Western group showed a significantly stronger color-valence interaction than the Chinese group in red-green opposition, while effects in red-white opposition did not differ between cultures. Our findings complement those from explicit association research in an unexpected manner: Where explicit measures showed similarities between cultures (associations for red and green), our results revealed differences; and where explicit measures showed differences (associations with white), our results showed similarities, underlining the value of applying comprehensive measures in cross-cultural research on cross-modal associations.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Vienna Cognitive Science Hub, Research Platform Mediatised Lifeworlds: Young people's narrative constructions, connections and appropriations
- External organisation(s)
- Shaanxi Normal University, Nexus International School, Central China Normal University, University of Macau
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/fa7k9
- Publication date
- 11-2021
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 501006 Experimental psychology, 501011 Cognitive psychology
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/the-good-the-bad-and-the-red-implicit-colorvalence-associations-across-cultures(c1f99285-8229-4367-b3ae-0b72311eee14).html